"Metallica, Greedy Capitalist Pigs"

Man, can you fucking imagine how all those angst-ridden, law-breaking, authority-hating
punk teens are reacting to Metallica hiding behind an expensive lawyer and begging
for help from Congress? Has rock and roll really died this time? Is the Metallica-Napster
fiasco going to be rock's memento mori?

The whole thing is fucking ridiculous. (interesting side note: Slavek informed
me that on average, I swear 2.8 times per page, according to a site he found;
this text file has the rest of my swearing stats,
so check it out!) Metallica somehow caught wind that Napster, a program that
lets its users search each other's hard drives for MP3s that they want to download,
was letting people freely pirate their music. In no time, Metallica had summoned
Howard King as its lawyer, and the attack began.

Metallica filed suit against Napster, claiming that the company knowingly allows
for the transfer of copyrighted material. This last weekend (I wrote this Soapbox
on May 4th), Metallica had an independent consulting company monitor Napster and
keep track of users who distributed Metallica MP3s. At the end of the weekend,
they had collected over 300,000 accounts that were guilty. They requested that
Napster shut down all of those accounts, and they even dressed it up with Lars
Ulrich, the Metallica drummer, helping to wheel in 60,000 pages of legal documents
addressing the matter.

Holy shit, man. When the fuck did the counter-culture rock and rollers stop yelling
about blood and death and murder and hate and start singing the legalese song,
schmoozing with the Suits and Execs?

Needless to say, the online community is furious. Being bored out of my mind, I
attended the online chat Metallica held for its "fans" so it could explain its
position on the matter. Here
is the chat transcript. Of course, the thing was basically a bunch of pissed off
people demanding answers from Metallica, and Metallica speaking behind a public
relations rep with answers that hardly related to any important issues at all.
But some of the things Metallica said really illustrated how far they've come.

Normally I don't like that whole notion of fans claiming a band has sold out.
Making money is the subconscious goal, whether people admit it or not. When
you are offered a lot of money you're willing to bend the lines a bit in order
to do it, even if it means appearing as though you're selling out. Granted, I
don't agree with the practice, but I understand how tempting it is. Metallica
defines selling out the best out of any example I've seen yet.

Get this. Lars Ulrich, to wit, ""It is therefore sickening to know that our
art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is."

Ahahaha. Let the roast begin. Okay, Lars, I get it now. When your CD is sold
at a bloated $15 to $20 at the store, that's NOT a commodity, yet when your songs
are distributed for FREE, they ARE a commodity. When people pay $15 to $20 for your
album, somehow it magically becomes art. I understand, Mr. Ulrich. You fucking
cunt.

It sounds to me as though Metallica has been misinformed by its lawyer, the notorious
Howard King, who is also spearheading another anti-MP3 effort against universities
and students, using Dr. Dre as his whore. In the online chat, Metallica specifically
was asked if it had ever seen Napster in use before, and their response was that
they had never gone to those sites. Quite suspect, given that Napster is not a
site, it's a piece of software. Metallica also admitted it doesn't go online
very often. Metallica knows not what they do, for they are pawns for someone else's
games, and are too stupid to realize it.

Metallica of course claimed that it had no problems with the MP3 format itself.
And why should they? It's only a file format that by its nature allows for
unlimited duplication and piracy. No, Metallica has nothing against THAT.
All they want to do, apparently, is as follows: "The ideal situation is clear and
simple -- to put Napster out of business." They went on to say, ""We're not saying
that bands who want to be part of Napster should not be allowed to." And then,
"We're suing Napster for one reason and one reason because they exist to pirate
music, nothing more, nothing less." Okay, this is why they play rock music and
not muse upon Cicero and James Marshall. Wait wait wait, is Napster inherently bad,
as you seem to villify it, or is it good, because some bands use Napster legitimately?
I don't understand. Napster is taking the brunt of this stupid attack, isn't it?

Metallica claimed that these people using Napster were the lowest common denominator
of thief around. Instead of having the balls to come out of their apartments
or dorms, they said, in order to go to a store and steal the album off the racks,
these cowards instead download the music over the Internet. Well well well,
isn't Metallica the rebellious, fuck-everything band it became known for?

Metallica also stated in its chat that it was one of the first bands to take a
stand against this blatant piracy online before it all got out of hand. Metallica,
they said (and I'm not joking), said that it was a band that was always in the
driver seat, not in the passenger seat. Hahahaha. Ohh, stop it, my sides are
hurting. What fucking pompous idiots. They are trying to come off as progressive
and the last bastion of copyright, stopping a multitude of evil, immoral people
from corrupting the sanctimonious realm of the music industry.

And what's more, they went on to say that they do not create music just for free --
it's how they make a living. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. Yes, that's right!
What more proof of selling out do you need?! My god. Metallica, a scrappy little
garage band that tried to get exposure by passing out bootlegs, is now stating
that its only reason for making music is to make money. Otherwise, they'd have
to get real jobs. And with their qualifications, they could be lots of things:
septic tank repairman, burger flipper, the subjects of the newest episode of
VH1's "Where are They Now?"

I have the utmost contempt for Metallica now. It wasn't enough that they changed
their image from a grungy, nasty long-haired band to a cleancut, posh, stylish
MTV group. Then they went after people who were mainly their fans. All so they
could add a few more bucks to their already overflowing coffers. You really think
that the smaller, less successful bands are identifying with Metallica's pains?

The biggest open source/Linux advocacy site of them all, /.,
somehow scored an interview with Metallica, and in true class, asks its readers
to submit their own questions to be asked to the band, which can be found
here. In
fact, that's where I got a lot of info for this Soapbox. Anyway, one of the
funnier things posted was this: "What were you more surprised by: The fact that
Napster makes it easy to access music, or that there were actually as many as
335,000 people out there who had any interest in Metallica?" LOL.

That's just the thing. The only people being shafted here are Metallica fans.
And all of it is being done under the shield of antiquated copyright law which
in my mind there is no doubt it'll be obsolete and completely replaced within the
next decade.

Let's get to the effects that all this will have. First of all, even if Napster
is brought down by a collaboration of starving multimillionaire artists, other
pieces of software that's even more impervious to attack already exist. There
is Gnutella, an offspring of Napster,
which uses a distributed network instead of a centralized one on Napster. To
explain, Napster has a base of servers that people connect to in order to
search libraries of the current music online. This means that lawyers can go
after the company or organization that hosts those servers. With Gnutella, it
has no central bank of servers -- users connect to other users and the libraries
are shared in that way. This is how the Internet works. There is no main "artery"
as Metallica calls Napster. You can stop one node on the network, but hundreds
of others spring up during the time you spent on the one node. Also, the loss
of Napster would be the loss of what is really only a recent innovation. Metallica
songs are passed freely through FTP sites, IRC networks that have automated bots
distributing music, passed over college and work networks, etc. That's how it's
been done for years, and there's no way that that will ever be stopped.

Metallica is indeed sacrificing its own image in order to fight an overwhelming
tide. It probably has no clue about what it's getting itself into. Metallica
has succumbed to the Internet's effect. Raising a furor over something will only
expose it to even more people who will begin to use it and love it. The Internet
thrives on publicity and attention. The best thing you can do online is to shut
up and not say anything. Calling attention to a problem has the adverse effect
of increasing its popularity, simply because there are millions of people who do
not CARE if someone like Metallica doesn't get their money.

I have changed my views on copyrighted material. I really no longer care if artists
get paid. I mean, honestly, MP3s don't seem to have any documented negative
effect on the industry. Even the Recording Industry Association of America
admitted that its CD sales were at record numbers last year, despite the huge
MP3 movement. I do not buy their argument at all. In fact it seems as though
peoples' music influences are more diverse now and that people are buying CDs just
as they were in the past, because they still want that perfect CD quality with
the special insert and jewel case. Ironically, many people still feel they should
pay for albums even though they can get them for free. They are VOLUNTARILY
paying! Imagine that.

Another effect is that in ten years, when the whole music industry has changed
and artists and fans exchange money for music in ways more fair to everyone, such
as through very inexpensive charge per use systems, or not even exchanging money
at all (with artists earning money through live acts or whatever), is that Metallica
and Dr. Dre will go ON RECORD as being groups that bent over for the lawyers and
Congress. There will be NO denying that these groups sold out, that they lost
their counter-culture appeal, that they alienated themselves from their fans.
I am happy to let them hang themselves, even if they manage to victimize weak
chains in the link like Napster.

Metallica hopes that their attack will allow other artists to be more courageous
about bringing their claims to the public as well. But in fact, the opposite
is occurring. I have read stories of overwhelming disgust for Metallica
from other bands. And I applaud them for remaining true to the fans and to the
profession. A guy I know on IRC said that he just went to a Joe Satriani concert
and while another of his guitarists was playing a solo, Satriani said that you could
get his album online in MP3 format. "Just don't tell Metallica," he added.
Hahaha.

The Bloodhound Gang's current tour has the word "Metallica" crossed out with
its own lightning bolts. Chuck D, a former member of Public Enemy, has openly
promoted Napster, saying it allows for an entirely new way for artists to
distribute their music. He recently announced a contest to come up with rap
lyrics promoting Napster.

And this, an excerpt from an article
detailing the online chat session, said, "Not all artists, however, are anti-Napster.
The Offspring recently spoke out in support of the company, while Limp Bizkit
announced that it would embark upon a completely free tour sponsored by the
software maker. 'We believe that the Internet and Napster should not be ignored
by the music industry as tools to promote awareness for bands and [to] market
music,' frontman Fred Durst said at a press conference. 'We could [sic] care less
about the older generation's need to keep doing business as usual. We care more
about what our fans want, and our fans want music on the Internet.'"

"I kiss you!!" Those words just make me want to go out and buy albums by The
Offspring and Limp Bizkit. These people are the true people with balls, the
people who are acknowledging that more liquid forms of distribution are ultimately
good for artists. They follow a tradition of some older bands like the Grateful
Dead and the Black Crowes that have given their fans considerable freedom to
distribute band performance tapes and whatnot. They remain true to what the
young generation wants and is attracted to. They see music for what it is.

Bands are taking sides, and it is obvious to me who will win. Metallica's motivations
are entirely based on money, and they will end up looking like the fools in all
of this. And rightly so, I say. I have no tolerance for such idiocy and hypocrisy.
One of my basic tenets in life is loyalty, and when someone breaks loyalty, whether
to friends or a significant other or to fans, I can almost never forgive them.

Fortunately, our market is set up so that it won't forgive disloyal people easily
either. Metallica will get what it rightly deserves.

From Queen Hetfield: "There has to be someone that is established, with
integrity, and who has respect from all aspects of the music industry and beyond,
and Metallica is one of those bands."